DANBURY -- The discovery of a body at his former home in Newtown hadn't hit the news yet, so when two police officers unexpectedly appeared at John Heath's door on April 14, 2010, Heath quickly accepted the explanation that they were doing a routine follow-up on the disappearance of his former wife, who he'd always insisted had run away in the middle of the night 26 years earlier.

Heath also didn't know that one of the cops was recording the interview. So for nearly three hours he and his current wife, Raquel, answered questions and advanced their theories that Elizabeth Heath had run off with another man, that she might be living in India, and that the woman others told investigators was "joined at the hip" with her 4-year-old daughter had simply grown tired of being a mother.

But eventually, as the detectives repeatedly steered the conversation to the dry cistern in the basement of the old dairy barn on Poverty Hollow Road where he'd built an apartment in 1990, Heath finally asked, according to court documents, "What's with it?"

That's when Newtown Detective Joseph Joudy told them that human bones -- possibly the remains of Elizabeth -- had been found there.

The reaction was immediate, although Raquel Heath's voice dominates the recording played Wednesday for a Superior Court jury at John Heath's murder trial.

Although the remains were not identified immediately, dental records, not DNA, eventually enabled authorities to determine that the bones, wrapped in bedclothes from the couple's bedroom and shoved into a plastic garbage bag, were Elizabeth's.

"The teeth are the last to go. They're tough," Dr. H. Wayne Carver, the retired chief state's medical examiner who conducted the autopsy, told the jury.

The 32-year-old woman died from at least four blows to the head. But before the fatal blows were inflicted, she sustained a shattered left forearm as she sought to protect herself, and a broken left shoulder blade, probably from the same, long, thin, heavy object used to kill her, Carver said.

Other than playing the recording and the testimony from Carver, much of the evidence that prosecutor Warren Murray presented Wednesday had to do with establishing the chain of custody of evidence collected by Newtown and state police from the property that the Heaths lost to foreclosure seven years ago, and from the home in Bridgewater where they were living in 2010.

Among the items were photographs that showed a blanket and pillow case matching the bed clothing found with the body, which the prosecution is expected to say proves that Elizabeth was killed in the bedroom.

But the surreptitious recording also puts on the record that John Heath claimed to have no knowledge that there was a cistern with a concrete lid in the middle of the basement, and that the wooden floor of the apartment was laid atop the slab when the apartment was built in 1990, six years after his wife was last seen.

"I'm not aware of it, and I owned the place since 1973," Heath told the detectives.

Although much of the tape had been played for the jury on Tuesday, defense lawyer Frank O'Reilly on Wednesday asked Judge Robin Pavia to suppress the portion of the recording in which Heath is told the body has been found.

O'Reilly said that statements made by Raquel Heath were hearsay and inadmissible as evidence and shouldn't be heard by the jury.

But Pavia noted that O'Reilly had previously agreed that the tape could be played, and it would be impossible to edit out Raquel's comments because in many cases, she was asking questions to which her husband was responding.

"Pulling her out would leave much of the conversation out of context," Pavia said.

The judge repeated her previous admonition to the jury that any of the comments made by his wife should not be considered as evidence against John Heath.

"They absolutely do not come in for the truth of the matter," she said.